WHILE auto-enrolment has brought millions of people across the UK into the world of pension saving, one of its biggest drawbacks has been the woefully low contribution levels attached to it.
With employers and employees each contributing just one per cent to individual pots, the amount that has built up since the scheme started rolling out in 2012 is hardly going to fund a luxurious retirement.
Worse still, while most employers previously offered to put at least three per cent of salary into their employees’ pension pots, many used auto-enrolment as an excuse to pay just the bare minimum instead.
After all, with auto-enrolment prompting a sudden rush of members into workplace schemes, maintaining terms that had been in place for years would have been a costly business.
As far as employees are concerned, the rationale of beginning with low contribution levels was to avoid opt-outs if people started seeing large chunks of their wages disappearing every month.
Now, with contribution levels set to rise sharply in the next year, that fear has arisen again, with many in the pensions industry concerned that far from saving inadequate sums for their retirements many people will use the new rates to opt out completely, leaving them with nothing at all.
The dangers of doing so are not to be underestimated, particularly when it is considered that even the eight per cent that will be paid into auto-enrolled pensions as of next year is still way off the 15 per cent that is said to be required in order to fund a comfortable retirement.
Nobody deserves to live in penury in their later years. Putting money aside now in order to supplement the state pension is the only way any of us are likely to avoid that.
And if the money can benefit from employer contributions - the equivalent of deferred pay - as well as tax relief and years of investment growth then so much the better.
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